About Jason Thibeault

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

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About the author

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

4 thoughts on “More AFA nonsense: asking people not to discriminate against gays “violates natural law””

Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing that if they are really trying to quote Jefferson and the US Declaration of Independence, then they probably don’t understand what natural law means.

Natural law in legal theory is the idea that there is an objectively right/perfect legal system which law-makers should work towards, and furthermore that laws derive legitimacy from complying with natural law. It tends to be popular with the politically reactionary because it can be interpreted as saying that laws which are counter to morality aren’t ‘real’ laws and so shouldn’t be obeyed.

The guy in the video is trying to argue that something which is against morality should necessarily be against the law. This is a really old natural law argument (dating back to Thomas Aquinas at least) which has fallen out of use in most circles because no natural law theorist can explain convincingly why, when there’s no moral consensus on a behaviour, the people wanting to prohibit it should get preferential treatment (natural law arguments were made against granting universal suffrage and in favour of maintaining the laws banning blasphemy, sedition and sodomy).

tl;dr These people need to stop re-using arguments from the 13th century